


aligned, aglow

by recarmloss



Category: Titanfall
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 01:04:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9855209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recarmloss/pseuds/recarmloss
Summary: He and BT saved a world with a Predator Cannon in their hands. In the absence of a Vanguard, he could make do with a Legion-class, he thinks.Post-Titanfall 2, Jack finds a way to cope.





	

Two weeks ago, Jack stepped out of his last neurotech appointment with his mind scrubbed clean as the brass commendation medal they awarded him for Typhon—or rather, “as clean as things get, anyway,” Technician Sommers said with a shrug of her shoulders. “You can’t just wipe a person out of someone’s brain completely, not just like that.”

Part of him is grateful for that fact. The other, oh, about two-thirds of him is grateful that Sommers said ‘person’. 

So now when he thinks of BT his mind doesn’t set itself adrift, waiting for the ghost of an electric touch along his synapses. He doesn’t panic anymore when his mental check-ins go unanswered and his instincts stop expecting a presence that is no longer there.

Jack’s mind is empty now, purely his with no other to share it with.

This is what lets the grief seep in.

* * *

He imagines sometimes. It’s a healthy thing to do, imagining.

Let’s say that, in that last battle, Slone hits them one too many times with her lasers. Or, maybe Blisk thumps something a little too hard there at the very end, and jolts a few tiny wires the slightest bit out of alignment. All manner of things could have happened back then, really.

And then we’ll say that BT hesitates for the slightest moment as they are suspended in the sky. His arm took too much damage in the fight before. BT pauses to consider, maybe even selfishly, the value of his own existence, the human fear of nonexistence. Again, lots of options here.

The point is, maybe there’s a time where BT hesitates, stops for even the half-second it would’ve taken for Jack’s mind to realize what is about to happen.

And in that time, just as BT sets his reactor core to blow, just as BT winds up for the most important throw of their lives, Jack surges up. His hands reach, they scrabble for the edges and they twist and then they _pull_ —

—and later as he curls up on that chunk of rock and metal set adrift in an unmoving sky with a twinkling teal datacore clutched tight to his chest and Briggs yelling in his ear to, “Move, move, move!”, the only thing he can think, the only words he can make coherent over his crushing manic rush of relief, is, _“We’re safe, buddy. I’ve got you.”_

But This Jack is not That Jack. Who knows whether That Jack ever found a timeline in which he could exist; who knows whether there is any timeline where Jack ever figures out how to save his friends.

This Jack is sitting and watching the Marvins slowly plod along the Titan hangar, the engineers scurry from one pod to the next. He tilts his head back, his gaze following the trail of electric lights cast shadows across the heavy-set and unfamiliar chassis before him, just keeps craning his head up and up and up.

He and BT saved a world with a Predator Cannon in their hands. In the absence of a Vanguard, he could make do with a Legion-class, he thinks.

* * *

Two weeks ago, Jack stepped out of his last neurotech appointment with his mind scrubbed clean as the brass commendation medal they awarded him for Typhon.

Tonight, he’s having trouble sleeping. Typhon wasn’t- it wasn’t a comfort, not by any definition of the word, and Jack really honestly missed having a mattress and a decent enough blanket to keep him warm through the night, but even after all these years there is something primally distressing about glancing out the window and having to look down to see the stars.

He is tired, though, and he does want to sleep.

The lure of familiarity, of the routine, finally drives him out of his cot and tangled sheets and to the windowsill, where the SERE kit and Lastimosa’s old helmet rest. 

It’s almost without conscious thought that he pulls the helmet over his head, fingers skimming across the painted blue dragon. The visor is cracked at the edges where his static trickles into his peripherals, and from there into his ears—the earpiece is blown out, has been for nearly a month, but honestly Jack would rather face the static than the emptiness.

**WELCOME BACK, PILOT** says his HUD in fritzing, skipping letters.

When he tilts his gaze back to the window, it takes barely a second for the HUD to light up with the names of distant stars and planets, some of them so small that he doesn’t have a hope of spotting them without the enhanced visor. He breathes as he watches the letters bloom across his vision and hears only his heartbeat, not his own exhales in a half-second offset in the radio. 

**CHLORIS, MEROPE, IOTA TEMPESTATIS, VERTIGO, ADRASTEIA, TAU METUS, XI VIS** …

Harmony edges into view as Jack tilts his head, and Lastimosa’s personal modifications kick in. The letters cycle, scramble, reform before his eyes:

** HARMONY **

** HOMRYNA **

** HOMR___ **

** HOME___ **

The white-blue letters flare in time with his every breath, the brightness cresting and receding in the side of his vision as he watches the clouds and orbiting satellites in the skies above Harmony.

**HOME**

40 million people, huh.

**HOME**

He hopes they’re having a quiet night down there.

**HOME**

* * *

From there, it turns into a routine. It’s not every night that he has trouble sleeping, but when he does, he slips on the helmet and watches the expanse. Some days he wonders how many stars he can fit into his vision at once, and others he just peers deep into the blackness until his HUD warns him that he’s straining his eyes too much.

(And there’s no recognition, no realization, or nothing conscious, at the very least. There is no awareness of neurons in the back of his skull blinking back to life, of connections rebuilding themselves in the clumsy way that someone relearns a bike after the decades that pass.)

On occasion he gets nightmares. Relatively infrequent, he thinks, but it’s hard to be thankful for the blessing when he wakes with false memories of falling and falling and never being caught, of his chest crumpling under the pressure surrounding the Ark, of BT being eviscerated right in front of him.

While they’re rebuilding the titans lost in the charge on Typhon, they let Jack use the VR pods, familiarize himself with the way a Legion-class moves, the way it trudges through battlefields and crushes everything underfoot. It’s not even real and his reflexes are still all muddled, the imaginary Legion interface just slightly off from what he remembers, movements just the tiniest bit too smooth, too slow. 

“You’ll work through it,” says Briggs. She offers Jack a clap on the shoulder as he heaves himself out of the pod. “Getting used to a Titan is hard, whether it’s your first one or not.”

“Yeah,” Jack mutters, dragging a hand down his face. He’s sweating but he’s not sure from what. “Guess so.”

He excuses himself with the beginnings of a raging headache plaguing his temples, vision just beginning to double itself as he stumbles back into his quarters. Instinct has his hands reaching for the helmet, and he settles onto his bed, back against the wall as the seals lock into place around his neck.

The static dissipates in his ears, slightly, replaced by a mechanical hum. He feels that he’s heard this before, nostalgic in a way that tears into the tiny little holes in his heart that have been there ever since the end of Typhon.

Inhales.

Exhales.

**WELCOME BACK, JACK** reads his HUD.

Inhales.

Exhal-

Wait. Something is not right here. There is pressure building at the back of Jack’s mind, power cell about to overload, a crescendo in the making.

The HUD has never used his name before.

“Jack,” says a synthetic voice, and the world lights up circuitry-cyan. 

It’s like all the pieces of his puzzle box brain are fitting into place, and it feels good, it feels _right._

“Jack,” says BT’s voice again, gentle and tender, and Jack doesn’t wait another second before he rips the helmet off his head and hurls it across the room.

* * *

Sommers looks at him oddly when Jack asks her if she can check his brain over again.

“If you have the time,” he adds belatedly. 

“I mean, I guess?” She shrugs. “I did tell you, it’s not going to be a clean wipe. But sure, if you insist.”

He does insist. Sommers and Fu and O’Neill bring him back to the testing seat, fit the metal cap back onto his head and run scans and wire electricity through his brain, ask him questions and watch the gauges and charts when he responds. PET scans, EEGs, the acronyms blur into one another as Jack sits through the testing, anxious and waiting, because he honestly doesn’t know which possibility is more frightening: that there is something wrong with his brain-

-or that there isn’t.

He gets the results two days later in a bundle of white papers. The helmet still sits on the floor and, on occasion, still lights up blue as sky. Jack walks past it with only the briefest glance. He takes a deep breath.

All scans normal.

And there’s the truth, staring at him in plain black type. He ignores the three pages that go into detail, his vision focused on that one sentence: All scans normal. Funny how he doesn’t feel like it.

Jack sets the papers down, just lets them slide and scatter across his bed. And then, he looks to the helmet, innocuous in its corner.

Well, only one thing to do, really.

The helmet slips on over his head, and again he doesn’t know what he’s hoping for: the static and nothing but the names of entire systems and worlds he will never see for himself, or the voice and with it the simultaneous waves of hope and mourning that leaves him vaguely nauseous. 

**WELCOME BACK, JACK**

His breath catches, and his voice almost does too. It takes him three tries before he can manage a hoarse, tiny, “BT?”

“Jack,” says the voice, and perhaps this is only projection, but to Jack’s ears the name is intimately relieved. “It is good to speak with you again.”

Everything seems to seize in Jack’s chest. Emotions he can’t hope to name—too buoyant to be grief, too ragged to be joy—overflow, spilling out from his heart to his veins to his thoughts. The neural link, only dormant and never dead, blossoms into being once more as if it was the cycle of winter into spring.

“I’ve missed you, buddy,” Jack says as his whole body seems to loosen. He hopes that the quiver in his words conveys even the slightest hint of the depths of his emotions. His HUD reads: **ELEVATED SEROTONIN AND ENDORPHIN LEVELS, ELEVATED PULSE, EPINEPHRINE** and dozens of other tiny lines scrolling past, and Jack disregards it all; he’s holding his breath, he’s waiting, for-

“As have I, my friend. As have I.”

Harmony slips into view, the curving horizon spinning slowly below and his HUD allows **HOME** fades shyly into his peripheral vision, glowing almost as if in askance. Jack feels BT’s gentle warmth in his head, not exactly asking outright, but curious still: Is he safe? Is he well?

Is he home?

With BT back, how could this be anything but?

“Yeah,” Jack says, and breathes.

**Author's Note:**

> i have had this sitting in my unfinished drafts section for so long because this is only the first 50% of the fic that this was supposed to be. but the last half is a bit too bittersweet for me right now, and it's also been a couple of months of nothing, and i kind of like leaving jack and bt to their happiness.


End file.
